My weekends were my own. I’d play with the kids, catch up on housework — I even managed to plant a prize-winning flower garden one summer. Once a month I’d have to requalify in demolition work, and I’d take my jumping quals once a quarter, and diving quals every six months- But aside from that, I had virtually no contact with SEAL Team Two or any of my old friends from UDT. If I had a specific question about operations, I’d call with it. But the nights of beer drinking at local bars and the brawling went out the window. I was, for the first time since I’d been married, a full-time husband and father. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought.
About a year after I arrived. Admiral Peet was replaced by an old sea dog named Ted Snyder, a salty ex-submariner who kept a sub’s Klaxon diving horn in his rec room. When he’d get a little frisky from his whiskey, you could hear him hit it half a mile away — awhoooga, awhoooga, DIVE! DIVE!
Snyder and Peet were opposites in almost every way. Peet was a professional bureaucrat, a paper warrior; Snyder was a deepwater sailor and professional ship driver. Peet was bank-president impeccable in his demeanor; Snyder was more informal — even sailorly profane from time to time. But I was glad to have the opportunity to serve them both. From Peet I learned to appreciate the planning that goes into good staff work. You cannot control large units by making seat-of-the-pants decisions, and Peet’s methodical, do-it-by-the-numbers style of command taught me both tactics and execution. From Snyder, I learned something just as valuable: the care and feeding of flag officers.
The old man took a shine to me. He brought me along to meetings and let me sit in. He took me to cocktail parties, slipping me a wink and a nod—“Buy that guy a drink” or “Take this guy’s phone number.” He’d talk to me about the politics of officerdom, teaching me about the sorts of ticketpunching activities, such as becoming a scoutmaster or making speeches to the local Rotary Club, that promotion boards weigh heavily when making their decisions.
To help me move along the old career track, he put me on the board of directors of the Planetarium, Little Creek’s quarters for visiting flag officers. Why “Planetarium”? Because that’s where the “stars” slept. Talk about scaling the salt off.
You don’t talk to stewards in the Ev Barrett mode. Nor do you carry on with the blankety-blank-blankmg language when you’re negotiating with admirals’ wives over decor. Perfectly coined Mrs. Three-Star Admiral Jones does not like to hear young Lieutenant Dick say the word fuck.
I learned a new word: subtlety. I discovered, for example, that such little details as fresh flowers nicely arranged can make a friend for life of a three-star’s wife — which, Admiral Snyder reminded me, was often just as important as making friends with the three-star himself.
To sharpen my pea-snorting, spaghetti-sucking social graces, he ordered me to take charge of arranging his own cocktail parties. So I learned to deal with the base commissary. My entire previous experience with food had consisted of slinging hash at Gussy’s, and working in a bakery during my Team days. Now I was becoming a maven on the subject of hors d’oeuvres hot and cold, exotic liquors and imported wines — even discovering through a process of elimination which knives and forks were proper for what dishes.
The same energy I used when training Bravo Squad or Eighth Platoon was now channeled into the new and uncharted area of catering. I was as demanding as a meticulous maitre d‘—making sure that everything was delivered and set up on time. But more significantly, as those flag-rank parties unfolded in front of me, a curtain was lifted on a style of life I knew nothing about.
As a Team member, even as a SEAL officer, I had ridiculed everything about “pinky in the air” behavior. It was something I mimicked before throwing someone through a plateglass window. Now, I realized, the highfalutin stuff, as I’d called it, was part of a complicated social ritual. It was a code — a code that I was beginning to break. And as Admiral Snyder was quick to point out, once I’d broken the code successfully, there was no height my career could not reach.
So — how doth the child learn? The child learneth through imitation. My regular contacts with the mess stewards allowed Kathy-Ann and me to begin giving our own parties, albeit on a lieutenant’s budget. I’d wander over to the Planetarium and tell the chief, “Chief, I’m planning to have thirty people over Saturday night. The budget is sixty dollars.”
For that sixty dollars, we would receive finger food and all the booze we needed, as well as two stewards in starched white Jackets to serve it all up nice and proper. The surroundings may not have been as elegant as the Snyders’ quarters, but we were definitely a couple of steps above the beer-andpretzels backyard barbecues I’d held at the Teams. And we became consistent entertainers, making a point of throwing a cocktail party every couple of months for the last year and a half I was on Snyder’s staff. The guest list was varied — a mix of officers from COMPHIBTRALANT, as well as my old colleagues from SEAL Team Two such as Fred Kochey and Jake Rhinebolt. Gordy Boyce came, too. But he was no longer encouraged to perform the Dance of the Flaming Asshole.
Admiral Snyder also prodded me to write a paper on the use of remote sensors in riverine warfare, a paper that he ran through channels until it was accepted as Navy tactical doctrine and gained me a letter of commendation. At his urging I also made an oral presentation to the Amphibious Warfare Board about improved ways in which UDT or SEAL teams could be delivered on-site, including one recommendation (it was later actually implemented) to reconfigure nuclear subs as underwater SEAL delivery vehicles, with launch capabilities for SDVs — Submersible Delivery Vehicles — and other SEAL transportation.
The hard work paid off, too. Snyder wrote me a terrific set offitreps (“U. Marcinko is one of the most dedicated, hardest working and professionally knowledgeable officers this reporting senior has observed, an officer who eats, sleeps and thinks Special Warfare, especially SEAL activities.”). But belter, he called the Navy program in Monterey, California, and virtually ordered them to accept me for the 1971-72 academic year. They did.
I went out and bought a VW camper — one of those vans with a fabric pop-top roof. Then I rigged a tow bar for our beat-up Renault; we packed up the house, said our farewells, stowed the kids in the van, and took off for California in May 1971, looking all the world like a family of Gypsies.
We spent sixteen glorious months in Monterey, where I finally received my college degree, a BA in international affairs. When I wasn’t going to school, or bowling or sport jumping or camping in the California mountains or riding the quarter horse I bought the kids, I was ticket-punching. I joined the Jaycees. I became a Cub Scout packmaster. (My Cubs were probably the only ones ever to hunt, kill, and skin frogs and eat fresh frog’s tegs during overnight hikes. Some of the daddies got queasy, but the kids were all right.)
I performed regularly on the public-speaking circuit, talking about Navy Special Warfare at civic organizations, churches, and schools. I was selected for inclusion in the 1972 edition of Outstanding Young Men in America. And I can personally testify that ticket-punching works- I was promoted to lieutenant commander in 1972—two years early.
During my last six months of college, I spent three days a week monitoring Vietnamese language courses over at the Army foreign-language school. Rumor had it I was going to be sent back to Vietnam as the chief round-eyed adviser for all South Vietnamese Navy SEALs. But at the last minute the job was withdrawn, part of the Vietnamization of the war.
Instead, I got a call from an admiral’s office in Washington.
“Lieutenant Commander Marcinko?”
“Speaking.”
“Please report back at your earliest possible convenience for training.”
“Training?”
“At the Defense Intelligence School. You have been selected to become the ALUSNA — chief naval attache in Cambodia — as soon as you complete the requisite intelligence and language qualifications.”
Chapter 14
I moved Kathy-Ann and the kids back to Virginia Beach
, bought a new house, got them settled in and enrolled at school, then drove north to start eight months of spy school in Washington. AH attaches — whether they’re posted with allies or adversaries — are trained as spies. The difference is that we are more subtle about spying on our allies than we are about spying on our adversaries. And unlike the CIA intelligence officers who work covertly under diplomatic cover, it is a common understanding among nations that military attaches are all primarily intelligence gatherers, reporting everything they see back to their headquarters.
And so my colleagues and I studied the gentle art of espionage. We were taught such rudiments as how to take a properly exposed picture and then develop the film ourselves.
We learned how to become walking dichotomies — smiles on one side, knives on the other — while maintaining cordial relationships with everyone. Indeed, the instructors spent a lot of time teaching us how to survive social situations. We were drilled in ways to get others drunk while keeping ourselves Sober. We were coached in the making of discreet notes (it’s done by writing with the stub of a pencil on a small piece of paper concealed in your trouser pocket. I always thought it looked siliy, as if you were scratching your balls). We were instructed in the niceties of wheedling and coaxing information out of our fellow attaches. We were indoctrinated in the covert joys of spreading disinformation.
I was given a crash course in ELINT — ELectronic INTelligence gathering — so I’d know what sorts of antennas to look for in the field. I studied photo interpretation and learned how to tell what ships were carrying by analyzing the containers on their decks.
And of course, we were schooled in the arts and crafts of memcon writing. Memcons are the stock-in-trade of the diplomatic set. The word is an acronym for MEMorandum of CONversation. And if you’ve ever spoken with a diplomat or a spy in an official situation, your remarks have probably been committed to paper and sit somewhere in a reference file.
To hone our newfound talents we engaged in an endless series of exercises, trying to elicit information from each other, throwing parties at the Anacostia Navy Yard 0 Club bar to see who could stay the soberest, driving out into the Virginia countryside to take covert pictures of country estates.
After spy school, I crammed six months of French-language study into seventeen weeks; put my household affairs in order; commandeered a pallet-load of SEAL goodies from SEAL Team Two to be shipped to Phnom Penh; and flew off to the glorious Orient-
1 had no qualms about leaving Kalhy-Ann and the kids behind. First of all, it was going to be a dangerous assignment.
Phnom Penh was a combat zone, so the Navy wasn’t keen on allowing dependents to accompany anyone posted there. Second, I had played daddy and husband at home for the last four years — pretty successfully, too. Now it was Kathy-Ann’s turn to take over single-handedly and let me go do my job.
We’d always had a traditional home, in which I worked as a full-time Navy officer, and Kathy-Ann worked as a full-time mother and housewife. That arrangement suited her — in fact, she insisted on it — and it suited me as well.
We took one long weekend before I left — a camping trip to West Virginia. It was a perfect weekend: clear skies, cool evenings, and the kind of sunsets you see in Kodak ads. I cooked hamburgers and hot dogs, we ate baked beans and coleslaw, and we sat outside our tent as the fire died and scanned the skies for shooting stars. Later, the kids crawled into their sleeping bags and slept. Kathy and I sat outside and had a couple of nightcap beers.
I poked my thumb toward the sleeping kids. “I’m gonna miss them.”
“They’ll miss you, too. They’ve only gotten to know you, and now you’re going again.”
“Hey — missing kids is part of what being a SEAL is all about.”
“There are times, Dick, when your being a SEAL begins to grate on us all.”
“It’s what I am, Kathy — it’s what I do.”
I had only one concern about going to Cambodia: the posting would displace me for one or two years from the bureaucratic chain that leads to a command opportunity. Before I’d left the COMPHIBTRALANT staff, an admiral named Moore, who commanded LANTFLT’s (AtLANTic FLeeT)
Amphibious Operations Support Command in Norfolk, the step up the paper trail to which COMPHIBTRALANT reported, gave me an outstanding fitrep. “Lt. Marcinko is one of the most promising young Officers I have known, with great potential for a naval career,” he wrote. 7n order to continue his development it is recommended he be detailed to command a SEAL team upon completion of his postgraduate studies at Momerey. He is recommended for accelerated promotion.“
Command a SEAL team? That sounded good to me.
Frankly, I’d never really considered becoming a commander of a SEAL team — or any other team for that matter. CO was a job for the Academy grads or the Naval Reserve officers who thrived on paperwork. It was a job for old guys, not young warriors like me- Besides, deep in my soul, I was still very much the Geek, the guy who’d voluntarily disenrolled from high school and enlisted in the Navy because it was one way of getting out from under my dead-end existence in New Brunswick.
But after Vietnam, as my salt was scaled away by such admirals as Peet and Snyder, I began to explore options I’d never really thought about before. It was a given fact that the Navy was going to be my life. But now, with a staff assignment under my belt and a college degree hanging on my wall, my career track could indeed take an unexpected turn toward the old command cone. That pleased the shit out of me.
Trouble was, the men I’d be competing against had spent more time ticket-punching than I had. I was still a very junior lieutenant commander. I hadn’t spent time in Special Warfare Group One or Special Warfare Group Two, or been tasked with staging the SEAL regatta in Coronado or organizing the Navy Olympic bobsled team. More significantly, the Phnom Penh posting would make it impossible for me to get an allimportant executive officer assignment.
Executive officers — XOs in Navyspeak — are a unit’s expediters, personnel managers, and chief schedulers. Want three boats in the water at 1425 hours? Talk to the XO. Need eight volunteers for some pissant duty? Talk to the XO. Commander ream you a new asshole and you want to get him off your back? Talk to the XO. XOs learn how the CO thinks, then anticipate what he’s going to need and get the job done before the CO even asks. They are also the sounding boards for COs — the one man the commander can talk to and— hopefully — get a no-shit, honest opinion from. Great XOs can make a unit. Not so great ones can hurt.
I, however, would get a chance to be neither. I arrived in Phnom Penh in September 1973, happy to smell the pungent Asian air that filled my nostrils. The city was an incredible melange of Third World and French colonial. I rolled down the windows of the embassy car that picked me up at the airport and breathed deep.
The Cambodian driver craned his neck to give me a onceover. “Vous etes officier de marine? — You’re a Navy officer?”
“D’accord,” I said, “right on.” I pointed to the Budweiser on my chest. “Je suis un phoque — I’m a SEAL.” I looked out the window. I could see the river, with its ferryboats and floating restaurants. In the distance was the Silver Palace. The dusty streets were thronged with people, beautiful, brownskinned, friendly people. “Oui, je suis un officier phoque,” I said again. I laughed out loud. “And I can’t wait to meet the phoquees!”
Life turned out to be better than I expected. Instead of a barracks room or BOQ suite, I was given a two-story house with a quarter-acre garden filled with tropical flowers and hundreds of orchid plants. The house had big rooms with whitewashed walls — perfect for entertaining. There was a five-in houseboy — Sothan — and a driver — Pak Ban — and within a month after I got settled in, a crew of nieces and nephews and other assorted in-iaws showed up, which brought my staff to more than half a dozen. What the hell — numbers didn’t matter. I gave Sothan a wad of money and had him outfit everybody. I put the giris in black sarongs, and the boys in black slacks and white shirts. As a coup
de mattre, I added Navy white waistcoats on which I had the SEAL Budweiser (the eagle, pistol, anchor, and trident crest that had just been approved as the official SEAL emblem) embroidered in gold.
I was in business. Or so I thought.
I went to pay a courtesy call on Commodore Vong Sarendy, the Cambodian chief of naval operations, and got smacked by reality. First of all, my carefully studied French was virtually useless. The Cambodians spoke their own style of French, much the same way Haitians speak theirs. So I stuttered along as best I could, but basically I had to speak English. Second, the CNO was very distant, even cold, to me.
At the embassy, later in the day, I found out why. The officer I’d replaced was a full commander — a capitaine de fregate. I was only a capitaine de corvette — ft lieutenant commander.
So far as the CNO was concerned, the U.S. hadn’t cared enough to send him the very best, and he took it as a diplomatic slight. Screw him — he’d never met any SEALs before-
The embassy was a large white building one block from the river. It was surrounded by a wrought-iron fence topped by barbed wire — an easy hit for the Khmer Rouge, I thought, as we drove through the gate.
There was no ambassador in residence, so I checked in with the deputy chief of mission, or DCM, Tom Enders. Enders, a protege of Henry Kissinger’s, cut an imposing figure. He stood about six feet eight inches tall, with longish silver-gray hair combed back over his ears and Coke-bottie-thick eyemasses. The product of an upper-class Connecticut family and a Yaie education, the man looked as if he’d been born to wear pin-striped suits.
He gave me a perfunctory glance and explained the situation in a rolling, aristocratic basso profundo. One: the com-munist Khmer Rouge forces basically controlled the countryside, so whatever supplies the government got, from bullets to rice to soap, they got by way of the river- Two; the guy I was replacing was okay but hadn’t done very much to improve the situation. Three; the situation was simple — the Khmer Navy was largely ineffective in stopping Khmer Rouge attacks on the supply convoys that came up the river from the South China Sea. Four: terror-bombing attacks inside Phnom Penh had increased twofold in the past six months, which didn’t do much to help morale or public confidence.
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